By the end of the 21st century, will human beings be supreme beings of leisure?

By the end of the 21st century, will human beings be supreme beings of leisure? Or will we be irrelevant? That’s the discussion people are having more and more lately.

Worries about job-killing machines go back at least as far as the early 19th century, when unemployed workers, purportedly followers of “General Ludd” and “Captain Swing,” destroyed textile threshing machines that they feared. Since then, we’ve seen repeated cycles of worry that automation would leave large swathes of the populace unemployed.

Each time, we’ve instead seen new (generally better) jobs replacing the jobs that were destroyed. The conventional wisdom is that the same thing will happen now. People may be losing jobs to robots, but soon they’ll get new jobs, fixing the robots, or selling them, or something.

But there are two objections to this conventional wisdom. First, just because something has happened before doesn’t mean it’ll happen that way again. And second, the new jobs don’t necessarily replace the old jobs for those who have lost them. There are reasons to worry about both.

First, machines are getting better faster than humans. A human is still a wonderfully versatile and capable worker. Many things humans can do remain beyond the abilities of machines. Yes, a computer can beat you at chess. But picking the dirty socks up off the floor, washing and drying them, and then matching them up? Nope.

But computers and robots keep getting better, while improvement in humanity, to the extent that it takes place, is happening much more slowly. A generation ago any good chess player could beat a computer. Now computers routinely beat grandmasters. It may be that the range of things machines do better than humans will come to encompass pretty much everything humans are able to do.

Even if every job destroyed by a machine gives rise to another job, that may not help the people who are thrown out of work. If you are, say, an Associated Press financial writer who has been replaced with a story-writing robot, you probably don’t have the skills to take a job fixing or selling robots.

These kinds of things led Vivek Wadwha suggested last week that we’re heading into a jobless future no matter what the government does. He writes: “Self-driving cars will be commercially available by the end of this decade and will eventually displace human drivers — just as automobiles displaced the horse and buggy — and will eliminate the jobs of taxi, bus, and truck drivers. Drones will take the jobs of postmen and delivery people.”

Well, possibly. I suspect that it will take more than a decade, but I have little doubt that self-driving vehicles will eventually displace truck-driving jobs, which is unfortunate because truck-driving is a well-paying job that doesn’t require an extensive (and expensive) educational pedigree. And a recent European study found that half of Germany’s jobs could go to robots within 20 years.

Other jobs are at risk, too. In the 1990s, writers like Michael Lind and Robert Reich were talking about how well “symbolic analysts“ — people whose work was purely mental — were doing compared to blue-collar types. But it’s the AP financial writers who are being replaced by robots now. It turns out that purely mental work, in the age of the Internet, is easier to outsource to foreigners, and it’s likely that it will also prove easier to farm out to machines. Computers will probably be writing columns like this one before robot plumbers are fixing toilets. (If you’re planning a career, take note.)

So what does this mean? Well, The upside is that with robots doing the work, humans will get to be supreme beings of leisure (OK, not actual Supreme Beings of Leisure) living life as they please without, as Philip Larkin wrote, letting “the toad work squat on my life.” And even if the economic pyramid gets pointier, odds are that a machine-run society will be so wealthy that even the “unemployed” will seem well-off by today’s standards, just as today’s unemployed are unimaginably rich compared to the working class of General Ludd’s era. As Robert Fogel notes, prior to the Industrial Revolution only about 80 percent of the “working class” was able to obtain enough calories to actually work.

On the other hand, Larkin concluded that he wasn’t actually cut out to live without work. And maybe a lot of us aren’t. Work makes us feel useful; people who are out of work generally feel sadder and less valuable than when they’re working, even if they are just fine financially. A society where no one works is one where people will look elsewhere for meaning and identity — quite possibly to extremist religious or political ideologies. It’s no accident that destructive movements like fascism, communism, and Islamism tend to arise in times of unemployment.

Then there’s the question of the machines themselves. Right now, they have no will of their own. But artificial intelligence work is advancing. Should they develop such a will, why would they want to keep working for us? Perhaps that would provide them with a sense of purpose. We can only hope.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of “The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.” He blogs at instapundit.com.